Currently, a significant number of data centers require servers to have improved performance and utility without increasing the physical space, cost, and management difficulty of the data center. The blade server is being developed in view of such requirements. The blade server system integrates a plurality of blade servers into one system with one standard base, and the operating systems and applications of each blade server are all independent.
FIG. 1 schematically illustrates the management architecture of a blade server system in accordance with the state of the art. In the blade server system 100 in FIG. 1, a base includes a management module 101, which provides a unified management interface for all of the modules on the base, such as blade servers 102-1, 102-2, . . . 102-n as shown in FIG. 1. Moreover, the management module 101 may manage an I/O switching module, a power supply module, a fan, a network connection module, and other modules not shown in FIG. 1. The management for the blade server system 100 is in accordance with the IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) standard. The core of the IPMI architecture is a microprocessor known as a baseboard management controller (BMC) 103. The BMC 103 of each blade server 102 provides for hardware of each blade server with the functions of autonomic monitoring, event log, recovery controlling, configuration, etc. Additionally, the BMC 103 of each blade server 102 can collect trend data, predict platform errors, and provide a unified interface for the management module 101. The management module 101 communicates with the BMC 103 of each blade server 102 by IPMI messages sent via a system management bus 110. Moreover, the management module 101 supports functions such as powering on, powering off, reporting of errors and events, and coordinating usage of shared resources among the blade servers 102.
Another important technique with respect to the data center is the virtualization technique. Virtualization has become a significantly important technique used in a blade server system, as virtualization enables improved consolidation of servers, increases performance, simplifies management, and improves efficiency. In accordance with the virtualization technique, two types of machines are included, one being a virtual machine manager, and the other being a server functioning as a virtual machine host. Different operating systems can run on different virtual machines. Commonly used virtualization software offerings currently include VMware, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V, etc. The functions of such software offerings are similar.
The virtual machine manager, as a manager for the virtualization system, does not focus upon the physical structure and the functional features of the server as does the virtual machine host. Thus, in the virtual machine systems in the known art, virtual machine managers detect whether a server functioning as a virtual machine host operates normally by detecting a “heartbeat”. Heart beat detection is a software solution based on the network “ping” operation. The virtual machine manager maintains the heart beats with each server functioning as a virtual machine host, while each virtual machine host further maintains the heart beats with other virtual machine hosts in the cluster. The timeout period of the heart beat is usually set to several tens of seconds, taking into account network congestion and delay. Meanwhile, the known method based on heart beat detection has inherent disadvantages of being inaccurate and unreliable.
In addition, in virtual machine systems in the known art, the number of servers functioning as virtual machine hosts that can be managed by a single virtual machine manager is limited. Considering WMware as an example, the current version can only support approximately 200 servers as virtual machine hosts, and at most 2000 virtual machines. Considering one data center having 2000 or more servers, the virtual machine manager must establish connections with the 2000 or more servers functioning as virtual machine hosts, manage thousands or tens of thousands of virtual machines, maintain their realtime states, send managing commands via the server connections, etc. Thus, in accordance with the known art, at least 10 virtual machine managers are necessary. In addition, the current virtual machine managing system cannot customize particular backup and error recovery solutions for different events with respect to each virtual machine.